Academic librarians and research: a response

Before you read this post, go here and read Mark Rabnett’s blog post, ““For academic librarians what’s hard to reach is time for research.”
I started leaving a comment there, but soon realised that my comment was likely to challenge the original post in length. Thus, I figured I’d just post a response here and link back. [...]

Conflating OA with other issues we like

At the 2nd International Public Knowledge Project Conference’s CLA pre-conference, a bunch of librarians and a few assorted others got together to talk about open access (OA).  One thing I kept finding myself coming back to is something I’ve been thinking about for several months now: whether we who are advocating open access should perhaps [...]

Embarrassing confessional: I am the faculty we complain about

At the Canadian Health Libraries Association conference in Winnipeg this year, there was a fair amount of talk about getting librarians (particularly academic librarians) out of the library and embedded into classes. I’m all rah-rah and yeah, that’s right along with everyone else, until I think about my own classes…into which I don’t invite the [...]

Tomorrow’s History & the Role of Public Libraries

I’ve been thinking about digitization and history; specifically the trusim that history is written by the victors (aka the privileged), and what that means for our current era.
With literacy and war-conquests-slash-oppression on the part of literate groups, orality became devalued as “official” history in most of the mainstream, dominant, Western societies.  Non-literate or illiterate people [...]